NFTs on the news: Mega-whale Pranksy brings collectible highlights to the fore

As NFTs once more capture mainstream attention, one prolific collector is leading the charge

On the evening of Jan 25, longtime non-fungible token (NFT) collectors, developers, and believers witnessed a bizarre, but likely validating piece of blockchain history: legendary collector-whale Pranksy was interviewed on the Fox 5 New York evening news during a segment on NBA Topshot, a NFT-backed collectible highlights project. 

NFTs on the nightly news is the culmination of a variety of intersecting trends. For one, it’s a testament to the developmental progress the NFT space has made since CryptoKitties, the last blockchain-based collectibles project to attract a hint of public attention in 2017. The interfaces are sleeker, transactions are easier, the prices often much, much higher — and in Topshot, a use case long thought as niche or secondary is gaining real mainstream traction due to an unusually snug product-market fit.

For Pranksy, however, it marks a celebratory lap for a collector whose rise to prominence and success is possibly among the most remarkable in crypto: on the back of a lone initial deposit of $600, Pranksy now claims to command a NFT collection worth upwards of $9 million, with almost $7 million in Topshot highlights alone. 

“I like to think of myself as the working man's whale,” the 29-year game developer told Cointelegraph in an interview. “I've never been backed by large amounts of FIAT, and I didn't buy Ethereum early.”

It’s a multi-million dollar achievement that itself demonstrates the growth of the NFT space, one which has been on a remarkable tear as of late. To get a sense for how both NFTs and Pranksy came this far — and where everything is going — we sat down the semi-anonymous collector and some of his colleagues to discuss whales in illiquid markets, recognizing successful new products, and the future of digital collecting.

Slow grind

Pranksy making the news through his NBA Topshot collection has a pleasing touch of synchronicity to it: the collector first entered NFT markets because of another project from Topshot developers Dapper Labs, CryptoKitties. 

“So I started NFTs in 2017 after getting a tip off from a friend (My now business partner Carlini8) that 'digital cat pics' were going viral and selling for loads of money. I took a look at the site, installed Metamask, deposited $600-$800 in ETH and never looked back.”

In just a few weeks, his deposit grew to upwards of $30,000 as CryptoKitty mania took hold and clogged up Ethereum for days on end.

From there, Pranksy branched out to other projects, turning “flipping” into a second source of income aside from game development. His niche was investing heavily into projects at launch, commanding a huge supply of the circulating NFTs and growing “notorious for providing a lot of volume and liquidity to a project.”

“Pranked is a market expert and volume churner at the highest level,” said fellow NFT collector and developer Nate Hart. “People hate on flippers because of the downward pressure they put on a market, but the reality is they're essential since a project with no volume is often a dead project.”

Nate and Pranksy have long been friends and rivals, and in 2020 engaged in a semi-public race to 1000 Ethereum in profits from NFT trades (a race that Hart made sure to specify that he’d won). Pranksy’s cornering of the Topshot market, however, has put him back in the lead.

While Pranksy’s early and aggressive accumulation of NBA Topshot Moments was a tactic he’d developed over years of practice, it wasn’t always an easy journey.

“2018-20 was a hell of a grind, scraping around for an ETH here or there, when ETH was $200,” Pranksy said.

His Opensea and Ethereum address functionally serve as histories of the NFT landscape from 2017-present, with hundreds of projects and millions of NFTs represented in his hoard.

Whales’ world

Pranksy’s rise to whale status coincides with a growing number of major traders and collectives looking to replicate his strategies — and possibly do so with more sinister intentions. 

In the traditional art world, individuals can amass and effectively control corners of the market, such as the Mugrabi family with Andy Warhol work. Given the sudden interest from retail investors, the same practices could be applied to NFTs with relatively minimal capital.

Just last week, the half billion dollar whale wallet turn Twitter personality 0x_b1 placed a 600 ETH bid for a rare CryptoPunk, the original generative art NFT project, only to be outbid by a group of buyers including FlamingoDAO, a DAO which focuses on NFT investments. The Punk now has a social-media managed personality, a marketing innovation first brought to the fore by Axia, another wildly high-priced NFT.